Meanwhile, my mom was looking for a new house on the west side of the Denver metro. She hated where we lived, though she didn’t ever admit it to me until later. But, I especially hated where we lived, and constantly expressed my opinions every chance I had. My mom didn’t appreciate my rants nearly as much as I did, but I still think they helped pressure my mom to find a new house sooner than later. Our neighborhood crime rate was increasing, my mom’s best friend was moving away, and the storms that hit our house seemed to be getting worse. We used to stay with my grandparents’ across town if severe weather was in the next day’s forecast, and when everything passed, we came back home, counted the damages, and repaired the things that needed to be repaired. Thankfully, we never lost our house, but we had our close calls.
My mom ended up buying a house in a decent neighborhood just west of Littleton, Colorado, just a few miles away from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But it needed some serious renovations before we could move in. It was a split-level home built in the early 1970s that didn’t have any renovations before we bought it. The garden level basement was unfinished, while the upstairs had neon purple and green wallpaper, salmon colored bedroom walls, scratched wood paneling, and a dining table fixture in the center of the small kitchen. The back deck also rotten, and had to be completely rebuilt, and the backyard was nothing but weeds. But, being a real estate agent with plenty of connections, my mom knew she could get it beautifully renovated within several months for a reasonable price.
By the time I got to see the house a month before we moved in, most of the renovations were already done. The house had two bedrooms in the basement, even though my mom asked for three. Apparently, the construction crew couldn’t build three because three bedrooms wouldn’t fit. Instead, they converted one third of the basement into one large bedroom, so of course I claimed that room as my own. Upstairs, they had gotten rid of the nasty wallpaper, wood paneling, and salmon painted walls, except for the wood paneling near the front entrance, because it wasn’t damaged and my mom didn’t want to get rid of it. They also knocked out a wall in the kitchen and built a bar there, which became our dining table.
As soon as I saw our renovated house, I couldn’t wait to leave Denver and move just a few short miles from the front range of Colorado. I knew when I moved houses, I’d also change schools, and I’d leave my dojo behind. But I didn’t care! I wanted out of northeast Denver, and I was gonna sacrifice my black belt and athletic school if it meant I got to move into a much nicer house, closer to the mountains, in a neighborhood I could sleep in without being woken up by airplanes and/or gunshots!
I was worried about school though. The only high schools I knew of around Littleton were huge public high schools, and I knew I wouldn’t do very well in high schools like Columbine where there were well over 2,000 students. However, my mom found a tiny Christian school just a few blocks away from our new house, which was a k-12 school. Jack (my little half-brother) would attend the school with me. That school only had 60 students in it, 8 of which made up the entire high school.
I left my downtown school a few days before the last day to help load our boxes into the Uhaul truck and get settled in my new house. I didn’t realize just how big my new bedroom was until I had most of my boxes unpacked and realized just how much space there was. My grandma had an old gaming desk for me, which made my room feel a little less large once we got it set up, and I had the whole summer to get settled before starting 10th grade at my new school.
That summer went by pretty fast. My mom bought a kayak, so I spent a lot of time on the lake at Chatfield state park. I also spent a lot of time in the mountains with my dad, riding (and crashing) my pitbike, exploring tiny mountain towns I never even knew existed, and getting lost on the endless miles of historic 4x4 trails that crisscrossed the mountains on both sides of the Continental Divide.
Up until then, trips to the mountains were rare for me. I grew up on the windswept plains of Colorado, almost 40 miles away from the foothills. I didn’t know the mountains very well. But, as soon as I moved to Littleton, that quickly changed. Thanks to my adventures with my dad, I quickly learned the names and locations of pretty much every little town in Colorado’s central mountains, and also discovered some pretty awesome off-road trails. I never enjoyed camping, especially after my dad and I stayed in a friends’ dilapidated and spider-infested camper, surrounded by coyotes and cougars, but I enjoyed everything else the mountains had to offer.
When summer ended, I started 10th grade at my tiny new school, which was held at an old church building on a plateau, overlooking the surrounding suburbs. I quickly discovered that this school also had its flaws that were hard to deal with, which got increasingly difficult.
